Face Recognition is a challenging task with challenges emanating from illumination, pose, background, scale and shadow etc. Each of them affect classification accuracy. Apart from these challenges, color leakage of an input image, as depicted in FIG. 2, results into significant reduction in classification accuracy. Also, it was noted through experimentation that background color impact classification accuracy. We address both the challenges in the proposed invention. In the present disclosure, the images available in public domain are considered to illustrate the approach and use a novel method of preprocessing to improve classification accuracy. The proposed scheme works irrespective of pose, orientation and illumination of input image.